Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (12 page)

G
ODARD HAD BEEN
able to put together
Charlotte et son Jules
using short ends of film stock sent to him by Claude Chabrol, who was the first of the
Cahiers
group to make a full-length film. Chabrol, who had been working in the publicity department of Twentieth Century-Fox’s Paris office since 1955, was able to draw on an inheritance from his wife’s family in 1957 to make
Le Beau Serge
, which was based on a script that he had written at Rossellini’s behest. The film, which was released in 1958, was a modest success, and allowed Chabrol to self-produce a second feature,
Les Cousins
, later that year.

Chabrol left his position at Fox and turned it over to Godard, a small step that ultimately reverberated with great results. Fereydoun Hoveyda, then a
Cahiers
critic, later cited his colleagues’ practical motive: “Chabrol, then Godard, went to work at Fox in order to find money for their films—in order to meet producers.”
³⁸
For Chabrol, the strategy didn’t work, and he had to wait for a windfall; for Godard, the job with Fox proved profitable—albeit in a paradoxical way.

Godard’s various responsibilities included the preparation of press kits for journalists, which gave him the chance to disseminate with a poker face colorfully false biographies of actors. He would also spend the day pursuing his own interests. Chabrol recalled that Godard used to keep the bathroom key in his pocket: “He would come into the office and look busy for an hour, and then say he was sick. Then he would lock himself in the lavatory and read scripts.”
³⁹
Godard enjoyed one of the position’s principal benefits, the right to attend the company’s private screenings, some of which were of American films not distributed in France, such as Otto Preminger’s
Carmen Jones
⁴⁰
and Samuel Fuller’s
Forty Guns
, about which he exulted, in the November 1957 issue of
Cahiers
, that this “brutal and savage Western… abounds with ideas of mise-en-scène the audacity of which calls to mind the extravagances of Abel Gance or of Stroheim, if not purely and simply of Murnau.”
⁴¹

Not all of the films that Godard saw at Fox excited him as much. After one screening, in early 1958, of a French film called
La Passe du diable
(Devil’s
Pass), which was being offered to Fox for distribution, Godard confronted the producer and declared, “Your film is a disgrace.”
⁴²
The relatively young producer, Georges de Beauregard (born in 1920), who made films on small budgets under eccentric and risky circumstances and barely scraped by—and whose political sympathies were openly rightist—was curious about this audacious young man.

Then, in the summer of 1958, Godard, benefiting from the good fortune of another friend, François Truffaut, left Fox to take over for him as a film critic at
Arts
. Truffaut had gotten the chance, through the good offices of his father-in-law, the film distributor Ignace Morgenstern, to make his own first feature film,
The 400 Blows
. At the same time, Godard also took other small jobs in the film business, such as editing nature documentaries and working as a script doctor (in particular, adding dialogue), but he needed more work, and he called on Beauregard.

Coincidentally, Beauregard had something to offer: a businessman had stepped forward to finance screen adaptations of the exotic travel novels of Pierre Loti. The first film in the series,
Ramuntcho
, proved modestly successful. Now Beauregard was preparing a film of Loti’s
Pêcheur d’Islande
(Iceland Fisherman), and recruited Godard to write the screen adaptation, paying him 400,000 francs (about $800) and sending him to the film’s location, the seaside town of Concarneau, in Brittany, to glean local details to add to the script.

Pêcheur d’Islande
did not at all interest Godard. The reluctant screen-writer added a love scene that would take place on top of a pile of mackerel, a scene that Beauregard considered a “comic masterpiece”
⁴³
(and which seems strongly reminiscent of, and likely an homage to, the fishing scene in Rossellini’s
Stromboli
); but he took off from Concarneau—heading back to Paris to resume his critical activities and to complete
Une Histoire d’eau
—leaving the script unfinished and owing Beauregard the reimbursement of his advance.

With Chabrol already shooting his second feature,
Les Cousins
, Truffaut preparing to make
The 400 Blows
, Rivette deep into the precarious adventure of
Paris nous appartient
(Paris Belongs to Us), a long feature film that he was shooting with donated services and supplies and no financial backing (and would soon interrupt), and Rohmer in possession of a script,
Le Signe du Lion
(The Sign of Leo), that Chabrol had agreed to produce, Godard was desperately scrambling for his own chance to make a feature film.

A letter he wrote to Truffaut—“Caro Francesco”—from Concarneau suggested how frantic Godard’s efforts had become, as he proposed several projects that he hoped Truffaut’s father-in-law would invest in: “Véronique pregnant… —Véronique and her kid—Véronique divorces, etc.” He also
proposed adapting a novel by Georges Simenon,
Quartier Nègre
, and, alluding to his travels in 1950–51, said of the book’s action, “It takes place in Panama, which I know well. No kidding.”

Morgenstern was not interested. Other producers to whom Godard pitched his projects were not interested. Godard continued to work at his patchwork of freelance assignments as critic, film editor, and script doctor, and awaited his chance with mounting frustration.

I
N OCTOBER 1957
, the journalist Françoise Giroud, writing in
L’Express
, coined the phrase Nouvelle Vague—New Wave—to name the generation of French people between ages eighteen and thirty “that had not yet finished high school at the end of the war.”
⁴⁴
She considered their concerns to be more inward-looking and hedonistic, less political and collective, than those of their elders, and she sensed that their ascendancy into positions of responsibility in France foretold significant social changes.

In February 1958, the film critic Pierre Billard, writing in
Cinema 58
, applied the term to young French filmmakers—and he meant it sarcastically: “The caution with which this ‘new wave’ is following in the footsteps of its elders is disconcerting.” Several other young filmmakers, such as Louis Malle (a graduate of the film school IDHEC), Edouard Molinaro, and Roger Vadim, had managed to get films made, and Billard was right to lump them with their established elders: they indeed displayed little originality to distinguish their films from those of their elders in the French film industry.
⁴⁵
Of the
Cahiers
group, only Chabrol had made a feature film,
Le Beau Serge
; Billard hadn’t seen it yet, and he mentioned it in passing alongside another pair of “attempts at independent production,” short films by Truffant and Rivette. Chabrol’s film was indeed not revolutionary in its aesthetic. However, there was in fact a revolutionary aspect to
Le Beau Serge
that distinguished it from the pack (although this distinction eluded Billard): Chabrol’s sober, professional competence had been won not in the film schools or through long apprenticeship but simply from an absorption in the cinema as an omnivorous viewer and as a critic.

A new generation of French filmmakers was indeed emerging, and, as suggested by Françoise Giroud’s sociological angle, they heralded epochal change. But this cinematic New Wave would be properly defined not as a generation but as a particular group of filmmakers with a common background at
Cahiers du cinéma
—and that handful of partisans was about to force its way onto the world stage.

Truffaut began to film
The 400 Blows
on November 10, 1958; early in the morning of November 11, André Bazin died of leukemia, which was aggravated by the tuberculosis from which he had suffered grievously since 1950.

In April 1959, Truffaut’s film, which he dedicated to the memory of Bazin, was chosen as one of the three that would officially represent France in competition at the 1959 Cannes festival—one year after administrators of the same festival had refused the director’s journalistic credentials after his derision of the films shown there in 1957 as so many “false legends” from which the French cinema was “dying.”

Godard wrote an ecstatically triumphant note in
Arts:
“What is important is that, for the first time, a young film has been officially designated by the public authorities to show the true face of French cinema to the entire world.” He praised his fellow critics for having “waged… the combat for the film auteur”:

We have won in creating acceptance of the principle that a film by Hitchcock, for example, is as important as a book by Aragon. The auteurs of films, thanks to us, have definitively entered into the history of art.

But, Godard warned, “If we have won the battle, the war is not yet over.”
⁴⁶

The screening on May 4 of
The 400 Blows
at the Cannes festival was an immediate success, winning acclaim from the audience and gaining in one stroke more publicity for the New Wave than all the films and articles that had preceded it. Truffaut won the award for best direction and now had no difficulty persuading Braunberger to allow him to make the film he wanted, an adaptation of David Goodis’s novel
Down There
(which Truffaut would call
Tirez sur le pianiste
(
Shoot the Piano Player
). Godard, however, had not yet made his first film, and he sensed that Truffaut’s success could open doors for him.

During the festival, Godard was in Paris, where he met Jean Douchet, a critic for
Cahiers
, by chance on the Champs-Elysées. Douchet recalled Godard telling him: “It’s disgusting. Everyone’s at Cannes. What the fuck am I doing here? I’ve absolutely got to get the money to go down there… Truffaut is a bastard, he could have thought of me…”
⁴⁷
Godard knew that the moment had arrived for action; he again “borrowed” money from the till of
Cahiers
and took the train to Cannes at once. There, he set the wheels in motion: he asked Truffaut to let him use the story that they had worked on together in 1956 about the car thief, Michel Portail, who kills a motorcycle cop and tries to elude capture in Paris while seeking out his American girlfriend there. He pitched the story to Beauregard, who was also at the festival. On May 9, Truffaut and Chabrol both wrote to the producer, with Truffaut agreeing to write the screenplay and Chabrol offering to serve as “technical and artistic adviser” on the film that Godard would direct, called
A Bout de souffle
(
Breathless
).
⁴⁸
But Beauregard, who was sixty million francs
($120,000) in debt from his two Loti productions, had little to contribute to the enterprise but his savoir-faire. A film distributor, René Pignières, of the Société Nouvelle de Cinématographie (SNC), reckoned there was money to be made distributing a New Wave film that would have Truffaut’s and Chabrol’s newly valuable names on it, and agreed to put up a small amount of money with which Beauregard would somehow be able to realize the project.

Godard directs Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless; Raoul Coutard holds the camera. (©Raymond Cauchetier)

three.

BREATHLESS

“A boy who thinks about death”

A
REGULAR FEATURE OF
C
AHIERS DU CINÉMA
FROM
November 1955 onward was the “Council of Ten,” in which critics from
Cahiers
and other publications rated new releases on a scale from “don’t bother” (a dot) to “masterpiece” (four stars) and the scores were collated into a ranked list. Godard was first polled for the issue of August—September 1957 and soon became a steady participant. In July 1959, the list was headed by
Hiroshima, mon amour
, Alain Resnais’s first feature film (from a script by Marguerite Duras), followed by Truffaut’s
The 400 Blows
and Howard Hawks’s
Rio Bravo
.

Only Godard had given all three films four stars, a gesture of recognition that their simultaneous release represented a landmark in cinema history: Hawks’s film exemplified classicism, Truffaut’s marked the French New Wave’s arrival on the world scene, and Resnais’s was a radical attempt at a cinematic modernism inspired by avant-garde literature. Godard, who was about to make his first feature film, conceived it in relation—and in opposition—to all three: against a dutiful approximation of Hawksian classicism; against Truffaut’s naturalistic form of memoir-autobiography; and against Resnais’s formalist modernism.